The Way Life Should Be? Vol X: A Bridge Too Far

“Neoliberalisation and globalisation generate and utilise the mobility of both capital and labour. Meanwhile, labour migration is presenting a challenge to the observance of labour rights. Present-day methods of capital accumulation rely on the search for cheap labour and the relocation of production to territories that do not protect workers’ rights.” —Piotr and Pawel Zuk

It is a well-documented but much-ignored phenomenon that parts of the rural Midwest have been totally transformed due to meatpacking companies’ employment of almost exclusively Hispanic migrant labor to drive down labor costs. The effects were already stark in the early stages of America’s “browning”:

Meatpacking wages fell sharply after peaking in 1980. In Iowa, the average hourly earnings of meatpackers in 1981 was $11.33, 50 cents less than the US average $11.83. Wallace Huffman of Iowa State University noted that real meatpacking earnings fluctuated between 1963 and 1988, but were lower in 1988 than in 1963. An INS agent in 1995 estimated that almost 25 percent of the workers in 222 meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa were illegally in the US. …  According to meatpackers, there is very high turnover among 10 to 30 percent of the work force, so that a plant with 500 employees may issue 1,000 to 1,200 W-2 statements at the end of the year. Some critics of the meatpacking industry argue that the companies encourage high turnover to keep most workers at the low end of the wage scale. … In Albert Lea, Minnesota, city officials were not sure that they wanted a meat packing plant employing 700 that was closed for a year reopened. According to one official, “a meatpacking plant can butcher public budgets as well as hogs.” One study found that, despite new payrolls, per capita income declines in some small communities that attract meatpacking plants.[1]

From 1990 to 1996, many Midwestern localities witnessed their Hispanic populations grow anywhere from 200% to 500%, largely at the behest of major meatpackers and other corporate interests facilitating their new labor force’s re-settlement, though not without substantial assistance from the government, social advocacy groups and law firms, and religious charities. The movement of huge numbers of alien peoples into formerly high-trust, tight-knit communities might help companies’ bottom lines in terms of labor costs and general product consumption, but it splinters and ravages these communities—which is also by design. The Democrat Party benefits from a bumper crop of new voters, the religious charities get to feel righteous, the Chamber of Commerce gets its profits, and the assorted “social advocacy groups” get to act out particular ethnic grievances—often via the witting or unwitting accomplices in the Christian charities—under the guise of humanitarianism. The list of winners definitely does not include the locals:

Given their small populations, rural towns can be transformed almost overnight by immigration, leading to issues that range from an inability to communicate with public authorities to non-English speaking children in school. Lexington, Nebraska went from a population that was five percent Latino in the 1990 Census to nearly 45 percent Latino in 1994, on a Census re-check. The growth of the Latino population is attributed to IBP, a meat packer that employs 2,500 workers, and has a $58 million annual payroll, in a town of 9,000. The transformation of Lexington has drawn mixed reviews. On the one hand, business, especially in the downtown area, is up. However, some established residents complain that Spanish-speaking meatpackers and their families drive old cars without licenses and insurance, and that the needs of their children lower the quality of the schools. The crime rate in Lexington has doubled. … According to one Nebraska police chief, “where you have the meatpacking plants, you have an immigration of Hispanics, and you are seeing an increase of gangs.”[2]

This phenomenon has been replicated across the country in different industries, from Wisconsin’s dairy industry[3] to Georgian poultry.[4] In Maine, it is the blueberry, broccoli, forestry, egg, seafood, and apple industries.

Let us consider tiny Milbridge, Maine, home to the Mano en Mano organization first profiled in Volume III, as a starting point. Hispanics first started to come to the area when a sea cucumber processor used a labor contractor to hire migrant labor in 1997; sea cucumbers are similar to starfish and their meat is highly-prized in Asia. The first workers were former blueberry rakers, and network hiring subsequently led to more Hispanic migrants. Consequently, Milbridge, a town of 1,300, is mostly White, but 24% of the student body is now Hispanic. Wild lowbush blueberries in Maine are “raked” from barrens in the coastal forests of the northeastern (“Down East”) part of the state. Cherryfield Foods, Inc. is one of the largest blueberry producers in Maine and provides free housing to its predominantly Mexican workers. Cherryfield is owned by Oxford Foods in Nova Scotia, Canada. Maine produces about $85 million worth of blueberries a year. Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, most of the seasonal harvesters were Hispanic immigrants or migrant laborers complemented by Micmac Indians from Maritime Canada. According to Maine’s Department of Labor, 18% of farm workers in the state are migrants, defined as those who traveled too far from their usual residence to return at the end of the workday. Ed Flanagan, president of Jasper Wyman and Son, a berry harvester,[5] told the Washington Post on April 10, 2006 that Hispanic workers are “like migratory birds. I mean, we don’t have to do much and they show up every year.” Washington County had almost no Hispanics in 1990, but today they dominate the harvest crews that “rake” berries from their bushes, not to mention the labor force of Aroostook County’s major broccoli farms, the coastal seafood processing plants, and other agricultural or seafood-related industries. The initial batch of migrant workers showed up because, “They say that they left California or Texas to enjoy the higher wages and better benefits associated with fewer newly arrived Mexican workers.”

The increased use of farm labor contractors is another major factor in the increased use of migrant Hispanic, mostly mestizo, labor in Maine’s agricultural industries, but the presence of advocacy groups such as Mano en Mano which are, in their own words, “working hard to alleviate impediments to settlement in the region,” is also a contributing factor to be considered. All of the laborers’ (and their families’) health care (including dental, eye care, and psychological care), transportation, and translation needs are provided for by another 501(c)(3) called the Maine Mobile Health Program, Inc. (MMHP), which is focused on “equitable healthcare and social justice.” Do you get free housing, healthcare, transportation, and psychological support through your job? MMHP gets a small subsidy from the US Department of Agriculture, and, according to the most recent financial statements I could find, over $1.4 million from the US Department of Health and Human Services. It was recently announced that MMHP—along with twenty other organizations, many of which we have covered such as MEJP, MIRC, and the like—would be receiving a $1.17 million grant from Maine Health Access Foundation.

In a joint project between Mano en Mano and Colby College entitled, “From Sojourner to Settler,” published in April 2017, we learn that when Mano en Mano conducted its first HUD-designed (Housing of Urban Development) needs assessment in 2011, “The organization found that 78.5% of the respondents of the HUD survey were born in Mexico; 89% self-identified as Hispanic/Latino. In that year, 93% were employed in farm-work.” Further, from the joint study conducted by Mano en Mano and Colby itself:

When asked, 98% of all respondents identified the town in which they live as “home” implying these sojourners have in fact become settled…[of respondents] under the age of 18 years. … 87% of these were born in the U.S. … Eighty percent of respondents to our survey identify as Latino or Hispanic. Eighteen percent identify as having two or more racial identities and 1% identify as White. Forty-three percent of respondents report speaking only Spanish in their household, while 45% report speaking both Spanish and English. Nine percent of households reportedly speak English only at home (my note: this is not “diversity,” this is an ethnic enclave)…22% of households don’t feel comfortable interacting or calling with police (my note: we can probably guess why).

What we can see here is that “documented” or not, the migrants are putting down roots and becoming settled, which is an ominous sign for Maine’s demographic future. The workers surveyed are already averaging over three children per family, which is well over the US average, but only slightly higher than the local average of 2.7. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where this is going, however.

One by-product of the reliance on predominantly Mexican-mestizo labor is that these families have coalesced into communities with a shared culture and language—which has made their ability to organize and demand better working conditions, benefits, and higher wages much easier, especially as, 1) their only competition locally is Whites who would demand even more and greater protections, and 2) there is a paucity of readily-available scab labor to replace these workers. In the late-1990s and 2000s, we began to see push-back against serious labor abuses as Mexican workers started to understand their rights and interface with local groups about unionization. Let’s use the saga of Jack DeCoster, farm magnate, as a filter, with a timeline combined from UC Davis’s catalogue Rural Migration News and Marler Clark’s website:

·         1996: DeCoster was fined $3.6 million for health and safety violations at the family’s Turner egg farm, which then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich termed “as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen.” Regulators found that workers had been forced to handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands and to live in filthy trailers.

·         1996: In Turner, Maine, Mexican immigrants dominate the work force at the DeCoster Egg Farm, the largest brown-egg producer in the US…was fined $ 2 million by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for violations of health and safety laws. This fine and publicity resulted in boycotts of DeCoster eggs, and a law approved in Maine that permits workers on large farms to unionize under state laws. Most farm workers are not covered by the NLRA.

·         1997: In December, the NLRB announced that it would issue complaints charging that DeCoster unlawfully interfered with workers engaged in union activities, spied on workers and fired union supporters; the United Paperworkers International is attempting to organize DeCoster workers. The charges were filed against the two successor companies, Maine Ag and Quality Eggs of New England. DeCoster paid $2 million to settle a $5.8 million federal fine for health and safety violations, and split into two companies…In the 1980s and 1990s, DeCoster was fined repeatedly for violations of workplace safety laws.

·         1999: The company paid $5 million to settle wage-and-hour claims involving 3,000 workers.

·         2002: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the family’s Maine Contract Farming operation $345,810 for an array of violations. The same year, DeCoster Egg Farms of Maine paid $3.2 million to settle a lawsuit filed in 1998 by Mexican workers alleging discrimination in housing and working conditions. Afterward, DeCoster subdivided into eight smaller firms on 1,300 acres near Turner.

·         2008: Maine Contract Farming LLC of Turner, Maine, the successor to DeCoster Egg Farms, was fined $150,000 by OSHA for ordering workers to retrieve eggs from a building with a partially collapsed roof.

·          Jack DeCoster’s Turner and Winthrop Maine egg farms were sued in August 2011 by a plant manager who alleged that DeCoster treated Mexican-born as “virtual slaves.” The manager said that DeCoster told him to “get rid of the gringos” because Mexicans accepted his authority.[6],[7]

These abuses are just from DeCoster’s Maine farms; his farms in Iowa were shockingly worse.[8] What you’ll notice is that the suits and fines, with the one exception of the plant manager in 2011, have seemed to dry up over the last decade. Is it that DeCoster suddenly became a responsible and ethical human being, or is it that as the 2000s progressed, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Haitians, Jamaicans, and sub-Saharan Africans started arriving in Maine in appreciable numbers? The uniform ethnic make-up of the migrant workers in Maine throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s allowed the workers to band together and attempt to unionize as well as file class-action law-suits. Clearly this is not beneficial for the agricultural industry, so a more diverse work force had to be imported. Each success wave breaks the bargaining and organizational power of the group that comes before and keeps wages low. It also harms the domestic population for the aforementioned reasons. I’ll say it again: this has nothing whatsoever to do with humanitarianism.

The Mexican enclave in and around Milbridge will not last. Already Mano en Mano is listing Haitian Creole alongside Spanish for the translation services offered, and you will find large numbers of guest workers along the coast from Jamaica and Eastern Europe. This is before considering the huge influx of sub-Saharan Africans or the other mestizo groups from Central America. The Maine Department of Labor has started to organize job fairs targeting African immigrant communities in Lewiston and Portland, bringing together translators, NGOs, and prospective employers. From the “Immigrant and Refugee Integration and Policy Development Working Group Final Report” for the City of Lewiston, December 2017:

According to the 2017 Maine Chamber of Commerce report, new immigrants and their children are anticipated to account for 83% of growth in the U.S. workforce between 2000 and 2050…However, as the writers of the report indicate, to incentivize immigrant participation in the Maine economy, “we need to be receptive to the fact that many of the people who will grow our population, workforce, and economy will look different than most of us and have different backgrounds and cultures.”… Several area employers, including Staff Management, Aramark, L.L. Bean, Barber Foods, Pionite, Labor Ready, Central Maine Meats, Commonwealth Poultry, Cozy Harbor Seafood, the Harraseeket Inn, Clover Manor, Conform, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center, HW Staffing, Central Maine Medical Center, TJ Maxx, J.C. Penney, Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Home Depot, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Wal-Mart (both retail and distribution), K-Mart, Hannaford, Shaw’s, Belanger Farms, Pineland Farms, and Goodwill, have adopted practices and policies to hire and support a diversified workforce.[9]

What all of this really means is that each successive wave of immigrants breaks the backs of the organizing attempts of the collected group before them, but the power brokers seem finally to have grasped that if you can’t even understand or communicate with the person working next to you, you sure as hell cannot propose unionizing to them. Thus, the more diverse a workforce, the less likely it is to be able to take collective action, and this is before considering long-standing ethnic grievances in addition to linguistic and cultural barriers. When they say “diversity is our strength” they mean “diversity is their strength,” for they envision a state of unlimited immigration from every nook and cranny of planet earth keeping things perpetually in the black.

Reposted with permission from The Anatomically Correct Banana.


[1] https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=126

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Some Wisconsin dairy farmers, claiming that 40 percent of hired workers on dairies are immigrants, were quoted as saying: ‘If E-Verify passes, it will kill the dairy industry in Wisconsin.’ John Rosenow of Rosenholm-Wolfe Dairy asserted that ‘60 percent of the milk that’s harvested is harvested by immigrants, and the vast majority are probably undocumented.’”

[4] “The Washington Post on April 3, 2006 profiled immigration to Gainsville, Georgia, the self-proclaimed ‘poultry capital of the world.’ Between 1990 and 2005, the city’s population almost doubled to 32,000, while the number of Hispanics quadrupled, so that the town is now 50 percent Hispanic. Gainsville’s demographic change was induced by poultry processors such as Fieldale Farms, Koch Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride. About 3,000 of Fieldale’s 4,700 workers are Hispanic and earn $10 an hour. About 70 percent of the pupils in Gainesville Elementary are Hispanic, and 90 percent qualify for subsidized meals.”

[5] Berry farm Jasper Wyman and Sons paid $118,000 to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in November 2010 for failing to properly complete I-9 forms on the 900 seasonal workers hired each year.

[6] https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=250

[7] https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/wright-county-egg-owner-decoster-seems-to-be-one-bad-egg/

[8] “In 2001, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that DeCoster was a “repeat violator” of state environmental laws, citing violations involving the family’s hog-farming operations. The family was forbidden to expand its hog-farming interests in the state. Also in 2001, DeCoster Farms of Iowa settled, for $1.5 million, a complaint brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that DeCoster had subjected 11 undocumented female workers from Mexico to a “sexually hostile work environment,” including sexual assault and rape by supervisors… n 2003, Jack DeCoster paid the federal government $2.1 million as part of a plea agreement after federal agents found more than 100 undocumented workers at his Iowa egg farms. It was the largest penalty ever against an Iowa employer. Three years later, agents found 30 workers suspected of being illegal immigrants at a DeCoster farm in Iowa. And in 2007, raids in Iowa uncovered 51 more undocumented workers.” https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/wright-county-egg-owner-decoster-seems-to-be-one-bad-egg/

[9] https://www.lewistonmaine.gov/DocumentCenter/View/8885/REPORT—ImmigrantandRefugeeIntegrationandPolicyDevelopmentWorkingGroupFinalReport

 

8 replies
  1. Barkingmad
    Barkingmad says:

    The basic problem is overpopulation/consumerism/globalization/urbanization and the industrialized food production system that logically goes along with it. You can’t have millions of white people doing easy busywork in offices in large cities and millions of cozy little organic/ecological farms (c/w the backbreaking labor involved) at the same time. And living under a revived Constitution, bien sur, with all our lovely rights and freedoms.

    Let’s get to the bottom of things, shall we. The vast majority want cheap, mass slaughtered flesh food; cheap eggs from ghastly factory farms, and out of season, readily available, cheap plant foods grown on massive farm fields. Fine. Then they are going to have to put up with nonwhite labor. We’re a weakened bunch: this is not the prewar society any more. The longest I could ever pick strawbs (for my family’s use) was about 5 hours in the hot sun. Anyone who has to resort to doing that kind of work, and much worse, has my sympathy regardless of getting free transportation and all-inclusive medical care. It is just a matter of time before all those Mexicans and South Americans say “***k this!” What happens next is anyone’s guess but I would suggest a total implosion.

    White people thinking they can turn this all around – at this point – by voting correctly are delusional.

  2. RoyAlbrecht
    RoyAlbrecht says:

    The ESL teaching scam is another Jewish controlled link in the concerted misappropriation of White assets the over all Genocide plan of Whites.

    Giving White youth an escape from employment depression in their (once?) indigenous White nations, and offering and escape to an “…easy, high paying, culturally exotic and usually tropical…” paradise serves many Jewish ends in their War on Whites.

    1) It clears White youth…, the energy that would or should be protesting their displacement at the hands of corrupt Jews in their own homelands,
    out of their own White lands while the cheap imports are funneled in to replace Whites.
    2) It creates a huge bogus market in ESL Certification (as if a certificate is needed to teach a barely literate Third Worlder how to pronounce a language that a White person learned from birth), job placement agencies, cheap ticket and travel web-sites, travel paraphernalia, hotel and hostel income, and other consumer product consumption markets…
    3) Once their meager savings from teaching ESL are gobbled up from traveling a year or so, they return home with nothing to look forward to except an increase of low skilled cheap Third World labour doing the jobs that not even they are eligible to get because Jews will not hire Whites.
    4) Race Mixing is encouraged in all these “…travel feeder industries…” advertising as being desirable. A deadly White deception.
    and probably more that I have missed.

  3. Joshua Laskin
    Joshua Laskin says:

    This situation is so pointlessly tragic, because a big chunk of new generations of young Americans wants with all its heart to do nothing except produce high-quality food, on the American land. They want to grow food practically by hand. But, of course, as they’re young and idealistic, naturally they have no money. Even if some of their families may have money, they themselves have no money. So they can’t buy land. They want to hand-craft traditional foods; which now get marketed as ‘artisanal,’ but which really just means, hand-made. But they have no capital to set up their craft workshops. The interesting thing is, their goal isn’t primarily to earn a living; but rather to do work that has meaning. Really, it’s a way of expressing love. Love of the Earth, and love of other people to whom they can present their products with pride. But, screw them! Let’s instead have profit-driven corporations come buy the land, and any empty buildings; and then import wage-slave labor, so stockholders (including the kids’ parents) can get a nice return on investment. If such industry degrades the soil, or poisons the water; oh, that’s just the price of our gloriously free market. We’ll let America’s future generations, worry about that mess… But, could there be a better way? Could America give those creative, visionary young Americans, some kind of a break? Heck no; because that would be ‘socialism.’ Better to eat cheap food produced by imported slaves, than to meddle with our great legacy of everyone-separately-out-for-themselves. All hail, the almighty dollar. The idealism of American youth, that’s but a non-monetizable resource we can afford to squander.

  4. royalbrecht
    royalbrecht says:

    While importing cheap labourers that speak different languages helps keep them from organizing in the Jew owned meat packing sector…,
    reducing the number of disgruntled White youth by advertising easy money jobs in exotic tropical paradises where they can learn a new languages and experience cultural diversity by blending with Third Worlders while teaching English, is a great pressure release valve for Whites.
    When Whites return from abroad, the neighbourhoods they left will have been largely transformed.

    Travel industry, teacher certification scams, easy Third World women, cheap booze, drugs and food, as well as the consumer products sector that caters to these traveling youth is a profitable Jew business.

    But the thing that got me going on this subject is the language learning thing.
    White kids are being encouraged to learn a new language as a way to enrich their cultural diversity.
    Instead of learning how to speak rudimentary Thai or Chinese while teaching ESL abroad, their time might be better served continuing their education at home and improving their own English abilities by becoming lawyers whereafter they can then take Jews to court in class action suites for treason.
    Recap:
    Jew steals White money to start wars in Afghanistan for Israel,
    Afghans move to White countries as Refugees to help steal from Whites for Jews,
    Newly graduating Whites move to Third World countries to teach English because living wages are hard to come by at home.
    Afghanis take low paying jobs that White youth should have had.
    Jew profits from travel, certification and consumer products industries catering to White teachers by enticing them with loaded adverts of happy blended couples leading the way.
    Vicious circle.

  5. Oracle
    Oracle says:

    Another thing that has to happen: some brave soul must ask our young people not to miscegenate and they must be told why. It should be someone who is old and who won’t mind dying soon to get away from the consequent abuse. There is no time to dither on this. The only retaliation would be to make whites marrying whites illegal and that would take awhile to do…presumably.

  6. Armor
    Armor says:

    The author says the reason the Mexican invasion is allowed to happen is not only to lower labor costs. The aim is also to destroy White people: “it splinters and ravages these communities—which is also by design.”

    But he mostly documents efforts by the meatpackers and the state of Maine Chamber of Commerce to import more non-Whites. As I see it, blaming the meatpackers makes little sense.

    If all meatpackers hire illegals, wages should go down. As a result of economic competition, it should translate into cheaper meat for the consumers, not higher benefits for the meatpackers. So, they don’t need low-wage workers, except if they are competing with foreign imports of meat.

    The meatpackers may conspire to keep prices up when wages go down, but they do not need to hire Mexican illegals before they start fixing prices.

    Let’s say the meatpackers and other labor-intensive industries do have a financial interest in hiring illegals. Most people and most non-labor-intensive businesses have a financial interest in preventing them to do so. It’s obvious that people become less wealthy as the West gradually turns into the third-world.

    Why would the government favor the financial interests of the meatpackers, who are an industrial minority? Do they have compromising pictures of Donald Trump? Are they bribing him? In any case, there are many ways to help meatpackers get richer, short of letting them import non-Whites.

    No one believes that academia, the media and the courts, have been bought by the meatpacking industry to defend the financial interests of meatpackers. The truth is that the government, under Jewish influence, is waging a racial war against White people. Nothing to do with financial interests. Big business and the chambers of commerce have been co-opted by the anti-White lobby. They have created a situation where the meatpackers want to keep hiring more and more illegals. But that is not a natural situation. The chambers of commerce do not defend the real financial interests of most business owners.

    The ongoing non-White invasion is a racial and financial disaster for White countries. The aim is to destroy us, but economists can’t say so. Likewise, the policy of shipping the factories to China has a deliberate goal of destroying the industry of White countries. Fortunately, it is becoming easier for economists to say so, thanks to Trump’s common sense trade policy. I wish Trump would start explaining that the third-world invasion is destroying the economy. It would give economists the courage to start speaking truth too, and maybe we would stop blaming the meatpacking industry.

    • Poupon Marx
      Poupon Marx says:

      Such touching naivety and very weak attempt at logic and reasoning.

      Why would the government favor the financial interests of the meatpackers, who are an industrial minority? Do they have compromising pictures of Donald Trump? Are they bribing him? In any case, there are many ways to help meatpackers get richer, short of letting them import non-Whites.

      It’s lunchtime, so I’ll cut to the laser: For the money, chum. That why the meatpackers and the legal and political classes do what they do. Who the paymaster is.

      “Nothing to do with financial interests”. If you are a college student or graduate, you should immediately demand your money back for making you less functional cognitively than when you entered. That is, assuming you were not a phantasmagorical as you appear.

      • Armor
        Armor says:

        The fact that everyone employs non-whites doesn’t mean we need them or benefit from employing them. The trick of employing illegals or low-wage migrant workers is only beneficial to a minority of business owners.

        But everyone, people and businesses, has to pay to support migrant workers who receive inadequate payment from their employers. In effect, White people are made to pay for their own race replacement. They are made to sacrifice their own collective, biological existence.

        A country’s economic success relies on smarts, not cheap labor. The overall effect of the third-world invasion is to destroy the economy and make most people poorer.

        How come we have not been able to come up with more bribe money than agribusiness and the meatpacking industry so as to get the government to enforce immigration laws? White people did manage to get Trump elected. How come he can’t even get his wall built?

        The thing is, we have Zionist occupied institutions. The Jews have a stranglehold over politics, the media, the Trump administration… They are locking down the internet and blocking open debate so as to prevent White people from achieving moral clarity and organizing political networks. They manipulate the loony left, which then tries to destroy the White race. They decide who gets hired in the judiciary, in the chambers of commerce, on the boards of big business…

        If everything was about money, White people would set up a fund to buy off the most treacherous, amoral congress creatures. Each of them would be offered $10 million in exchange for their definitive retirement from politics. But we know Chuck Schumer wouldn’t take the offer. He’s not after money.

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